Andre Breton Quotes

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

My pictures are my eyes. I photograph what I see - and what I want to see.

A picture is the expression of an impression. If the beautiful were not in us, how would we ever recognize it?

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Draw what you see.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

My mom's an artist in every way. She's a painter, a photographer. She's a wanderer - always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Don't ask me about this building or that one, don't look at what I do, see what I see.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.